


in the eye of the hurricane at last

by ninemoons42



Series: dance for your heart [3]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dance, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Inspired by Music, M/M, Past Abuse, Slow Build, Slow Burn, background Gladnis - Freeform, boys trying to express themselves with words, emotional tension, hey look they actually talk! all of them talk!, past abusive relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 06:32:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12788838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Prompto's issues with his life, his emotions, and his dancing all come out at last: so Noctis wangles a dinner invitation and summons reinforcements.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Akumeoi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumeoi/gifts).



Cities, Noctis thinks, are strange.

This is a fact, he thinks, as he succumbs to the pull of gravity, to the hooks of fear, and he crosses his arms on top of a polished wooden desk, and he hunches over. Lays his forehead on those crossed arms.

Tries to remember to keep breathing, and that only partly for himself. 

Cities are strange, and he’s visited quite a lot of them: cities alive at night with ten thousand colors of neon, the skies above murky with light pollution, the streets beneath his feet fouled with cigarette butts and the shredded and faded confetti of everyday life. Cities full of camera-flash, cities full of gawking faces.

And cities are full of safety and of shelter, too, as long as he remembers to look in unexpected places. 

A street corner next to a museum, with the paintings and the sculptures and the tapestries slumbering safe behind their ramparts, and a wide swath of green grass at the foot of a sweep of marble stairs. A twenty-four-hour bakery filled with the scents of gently heated sugar-glaze, the warm waft of toasted bread, and an entire garden’s worth of flower-scented teas. A noodle cart bathed in harsh fluorescent light, boiling water shivering roughly in a deep pot, and a dozen chipped bowls lined up in precise ranks. The fluttering silhouettes of coats and shawls and scarves against the shimmer of wineglasses and brightly-colored cocktails.

A dance studio.

Here he is again in the quiet privacy of this place, in the dead of the night, and he feels like he can hold that darkness at bay.

But -- for a change -- he’s not in any of the practice rooms. Those are all shuttered. The mirrors sparkle quietly, all clear. The barres are polished to a quiet gleam. Gone the broken rhythms of feet on the move, of bodies and their reflections and their shadows in swift flight. Gone the different kinds of music shivering in the walls and the wooden floors, the disparate cadences all running together into a spiked sort of aural surf. 

No, he’s in the very back of Ignis’s studio, in the one room he doesn’t actually have a key for.

He’s here, and so is the man sleeping in a curled tense knot, exhaustion radiating off him in spikes, only because Ignis has given them explicit permission to be here.

Noctis makes himself take a deep breath, and another, and he’s not even thinking, and he doesn’t even fight it, when he falls into the jagged rhythm of Prompto, unconscious: sharp inhale and exhale, like he’s about to run, like he’s about to dash himself to pieces on some unseen rocky shoal.

Rushing off to the seaside in the dead of the night, and watching the sunrise, and sand in the turned-up cuffs of his trousers, sand in the creases of his palms, and the shocked wonder lighting up Prompto’s eyes as the horizon turned bright and golden and scintillating, the sea and the sky in so many shades of bright blue, filling them up where they sat on the shore.

That shore had been so peaceful, and now it’s a million miles away, and Prompto had looked so wan before the sun had come up -- the sun had broken onto him, turned him brilliant -- and now -- now?

He had as good as said that he’d never gone to the beach, and Noctis hadn’t wanted to push him, hadn’t wanted to pry, because he’d been afraid of shattering that wonder, shuttering that light -- but he’d gotten stuck on those words, and he couldn’t understand. 

Still can’t. 

Never been to a beach before? 

And then: coming back to the city, and battling the swarming tides of morning rush hour, and the shock of Lunafreya Nox Fleuret on the sidewalk, and her hands, shapely and strong -- Noctis had always marveled at the grip of her, the power of her, the handful of times they’d fallen into music together, leading and following -- she’d said hello, and gone around to pull Prompto out of the car, and said, again, “I’m so proud of you.”

Words jittering from Prompto in response: “You can’t -- you can’t mean that. You -- I survived him?! What the fuck do you mean, what the fuck does that mean? Sorry, I, I didn’t mean to, I wasn’t cursing you, I -- what do you mean I survived him? What the fuck happened to Ardyn Izunia?”

Luna’s mouth, with the corners turned downwards. “What happened? What do I mean by _survived_? Prompto, he’s dead. He died six days ago. It was sudden and not at all unexpected. But I know you know about that part, the part where he was already -- not well. And he wasn’t, and he took a sudden turn for the worse. He was in the hospital, and he suffered a brief illness, and -- he died. Now he is gone. So you’ve survived him. He’s dead.”

“I -- no, no, I can’t believe it! He’s -- he’s dead, is he really -- I, I can’t -- oh, _fuck_ \-- ”

Noctis had watched him stagger and half-fall into her: had watched her bear him up, and take him swiftly into the studio.

Noctis had turned to Ignis and said the only thing that was running through his mind then: “What the actual fuck.”

He’d sounded so small, even to his own ears. So stunned.

“It’s a story, I’m afraid, and Prompto is right in the middle of it. That’s all I know,” Ignis had said. 

The name was, is, almost familiar: Ardyn Izunia.

In the here and now, Noctis’s phone chimes, softly.

Light, coming in from the corridor, through the open door: one set of overheads, still burning here, so he can see.

Still visible on the screen of his phone as he unlocks it: the results of his recent Internet searches. Obituary pages, a handful of videos captured from television sets and streaming sites -- and, startlingly, a photograph of Regis Lucis Caelum.

Specifically, a photograph of him in a production of _Giselle_ , as Albrecht.

The captions note that Ardyn Izunia had made a dazzling debut, playing Hilarion.

And again and again his father’s name appearing in the strange stories about Ardyn, mentioned even when the profiles were focused on Ardyn’s students and -- worryingly -- ex-students.

The pieces of the puzzle, the puzzle behind Prompto’s eyes, coming together: but first, the message that has just come in. 

Ignis, of course: _Is he awake?_

Noctis shakes his head, and of course that’s not an answer to the question, least of all because Ignis is not present here.

Speed-dial, one-touch call, and he mumbles, when the line’s picked up on the other side, “No. I -- I want to wake him up though. Should I?”

“Yes. That is what you need to do, and that’s why I messaged you. Wake him up, and do it gently, mind.”

He finds it in himself to snort. “Figured that much out.” 

“I hope so,” Ignis says. “There should still be some water in the cooler. Drink that, then come here. How long has it been since either of you have eaten?” 

“Dunno.”

He’s not hungry. He’s too anxious to be hungry.

Sounds of rustling, and running water. The quiet ring and clash of cutlery. “And Noctis?”

He sounds like the ground beneath Noctis’s feet, stable, steady, bearing him up. 

“Yeah,” he says, trying to borrow that gentle strength so he can get up and move.

“You remember what I said earlier: the story. Prompto’s story.”

“Not ours,” Noctis says. “Except for the part where my dad seems to be related to it in some way. It’s Prompto’s story, and this Ardyn -- I’m guessing he’s a big part of the story? Maybe even the biggest part of the story? But that’s not the important question. The important question is this: Ardyn Izunia is dead. Luna says so, and I’ll believe her before I believe all the news sites on the Internet. 

“So why the fuck is Prompto so fucking scared? Because him being scared, Ignis, it scares _me_.”

“And, being so frightened, no one can predict what he will do, if he’s pushed too far. We don’t even know where _too far_ is. So we must not push him.”

“I _know_ , okay. I mean I appreciate it. But you don’t have to tell me these things twice.” 

“All right. Be careful on your way here.”

“Not like we’re crossing the city,” he says, trying for a joke and thinking he doesn’t quite make it, judging from the tail-end of the sigh that he hears, in the last second before the line cuts out.

Water in the cooler, Ignis had said. A step across the room, and he’s next to the sturdy metal box, he’s pulling the lid up. Beaded drops forming on the plastic bottle, cool swish of the water down his throat, and he drains one of the bottles dry and he really wants another, but -- he’s not the only one who needs it.

The problem is waking Prompto up.

Back to the desk at where he’d been sitting, and adjacent to it, perpendicular to it: a strange combination of storage cabinet and couch. Mattress and sheets and a fluffy pale-gray comforter, and half a dozen pillows in a clash of stripes and polka dots, atop a sturdy base of four large, square-shaped drawers that slide out on silent rails.

How Noctis had laughed the first time he’d seen it: the last thing he’d ever expected to find in an otherwise efficient space, cramped and exhaustively organized. How he’d teased Ignis for building a nest to nap in, here in his own studio, his own little corner carved out of the city. 

Currently, that couch is playing host to an unconscious Prompto Argentum. 

And Noctis is just within arm’s reach of him, a short distance that might as well be the entire world, where he’s sitting at the broad plain desk with its trestle legs sheathed in metal painted matte black.

How he wants to reach out and close that distance, beneath the quiet shadows of open wooden box-like structures nailed up in irregular formation, like floating shelves for things like -- photographs and figurines and little notebooks. 

He can’t close the distance, he can’t risk it, so: he lets his gaze skitter around the room instead.

The pinstriped cartons stacked between the desk and the door are filled with -- Noctis can’t even bother to start guessing, so he thinks of things like files and leaves it at that. 

On the other side of the door is an entire wall that’s been converted into shelf space: and maybe the books in all their covers and colors are supposed to be the actual decoration for that wall. 

Opposite the desk is the wall with the window in it -- right now the blackout curtains have been drawn over the window -- and, sheltering beneath that window, the cooler that is now missing two bottles of water, and a potted plant with graceful leaves colored a warm, warm green. 

Of the photographs in the room, the one that draws Noctis’s eyes over and over again is the one in a silver frame, placed next to the unlit lamp on the desk. 

Joined hands, and hints of white sleeve, and front and center: the polished gleam of a pair of dark-metal plain wedding rings. 

Not the first time Noctis touches the silver frame with wonder, because it had been a jokey kind of gift he’d given for the opening of the studio -- and what did Ignis do with it? He’d placed it in the very center of the studio, in its beating heart. 

But then on the couch Prompto stirs, and sobs, and Noctis jumps and freezes, and he carefully lets go of the frame and the precious photograph within. He carefully pushes away from the desk so he doesn’t jar its contents -- and then he lunges out of the chair, and falls to his knees on the floor. His hands stop, inches above Prompto’s shoulders. Whispers, shakily, “Hush, hush, you’re safe, wake up, you’re here, it’s me.”

“Noctis.”

Eyes, opening.

Noctis can’t make himself smile, because he can’t feel it at all.

So he just holds out a hand, and says, “Yeah. Right here.”

“I was dreaming,” Prompto says. His hand shakes in Noctis’s, and his voice is slow, slurred, as he shifts and uncurls and sits up. 

He doesn’t need to see Prompto’s white knuckles because he can feel them, holding on to his hand with desperate strength.

He clears his throat and tries for calm. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Soft sound in response, that he can’t decipher. “I’m not broken,” Prompto says. 

Pause. 

“Okay, maybe I’m broken. A little.” Pause. Pause. Not like waiting for a beat and the next step. Pause. Sob of a breath. “Not a little. Kind of a lot, actually. Long story.”

Noctis swallows past the lump in his throat. “Figured as much. That it was a long story, I mean. The rest, I have no idea.”

“Ask me,” Prompto says, rasp in the words.

Not that he doesn’t want to ask, but first things first. He hands the water bottle over. “Drink that, and then -- hungry?”

Wide-eyed surprise after Prompto drinks the water down. “Yeah, I am, and I wasn’t expecting to be.”

“Breakfast was a long time ago, wasn’t it? Ignis thinks we need to eat, and trust me, you don’t want to say no to an invitation like that. And he’s expecting us. So -- come on,” Noctis says. 

Somehow he’s found a way to be steady, even as he listens to Prompto’s footsteps following his, the two of them closing up the dance studio for the night, all the way to the front doors -- he double-checks all the locks, and rattles the last set of doorknobs just to make sure, before pocketing his copy of the keys.

“Hey, Noctis. Car. Are we not taking it?” he hears, as he heads for the corner.

The wind calls a long lonely whistling note through the buildings rising over him, over them.

And he’s surprised, when he laughs: it’s a small laugh, and it skitters away in that wind, but it still feels good.

Quirk of a faint smile twitching at his mouth, as he turns to Prompto. “We’re not taking the car.”

He leads, and he hears Prompto follow: halfway down the block, past the flower shop and the daycare and the veterinary clinic, to a row of three-storey brownstone apartments, warm brick faces and all kinds of curtains hanging in the different windows. He turns in on the third stoop, the one with the green-painted steps, and he’s soon facing the brass lion’s head mounted on the front door, with a ring threaded through its teeth: but he boops it on the nose instead, and rings the doorbell.

“There you are,” and Gladio opens the door with his usual briskness, his usual decisive movement. Broad shoulders straining the seams of his sleeveless shirt, long hair tied back in a neat tail, ink stains all over his hands -- today’s ink is dark green, a stark contrast to his tattoos. The glow from the streetlights catches briefly on the ring on his left hand, plain and black and polished. “Just in time to eat as usual.”

“Aren’t I always?” Noctis says.

Fist on the move, towards him, and he dodges by bending backwards and away, knees and ankles flexing so he’s lower to the ground, quick movement, for a moment. It doesn’t matter that Gladio pulls that punch; he still doesn’t want to get hit by it.

“Hi?” Prompto, hesitant, still on the sidewalk. 

Gladio groans, quietly, and goes down to him, and sticks out a hand to shake. “How is it we haven’t met before? You’ve been dancing at the studio for a couple of weeks now and -- I haven’t been able to come in. Got a deadline coming, you know, and I’m so close and the words just keep flowing. Some days I don’t even leave the house and it’s Ignis who has to rescue me. Drag me out to the supermarket or something, for a dozen plums or a chocolate bar or something else like that. He likes his excuses.” 

That gets him a small smile.

Noctis thinks Gladio looks pleased. 

“I’m Gladio. Ignis says you’re good.”

Prompto leans a little in Gladio’s direction, when he lets go. “He said that?”

And his smile turns a little dazed, a little shocked.

Noctis smiles to himself and takes pity on him, and tows him through the door into the brownstone. 

Gladio nods, and hums a little as he leads the way up a flight of stairs, and: “Yup, and I don’t know, maybe by now you know this and maybe by now you don’t, not yet: but Ignis doesn’t say things like that lightly.”

“Took him a year to say I was improving,” Noctis chimes in, and he can’t help but feel a sort of small welling delight when Prompto blinks at him. 

“You’re pulling my leg,” he hears Prompto say, quietly. 

“I don’t have a reason to,” Noctis protests. And he smiles again. “You already heard me say you’re good. Now here’s Ignis and he has the same opinion. Shouldn’t that mean anything to you?”

Prompto freezes, right there in the living room, right next to an overstuffed leather couch. His hand over his mouth and his blush almost dark enough to blot out his freckles. His eyes wide wide wide in the warm lamplight, the copper-hued rugs at their feet, the sprawl of well-thumbed books all over. 

He had been insubstantial, waking up in Ignis’s office: pale and fearful and whispering.

He is vital and sparking, here, the light of the room seeming to flow through him and change, growing warmer and brighter, different for having known him.

And Noctis grins at him, at the him that’s somehow coming to life. 

“You guys are -- you guys are hardcore,” Prompto says, eventually, and the words are muffled because he’s speaking from behind his hand, but -- the words are shivering with a different kind of emotion, something Noctis thinks might be the shape of -- belief. 

And Gladio laughs as he passes through a set of glass doors left ajar. Words tossed over his shoulder, no less firm for all they’re receding: “Ignis is. And he thinks you’re something special. So you wanna take it from me? You can believe that. You can believe him. He doesn’t have any reason to lie, not to anyone, and certainly not to you.”

That leaves Noctis to collapse into the couch -- and he doesn’t even move or complain when Prompto half-falls against him. 

Shoulder to shoulder, again, here, with light and the background of another conversation, rolling softly against the glass doors.

“You probably think I’m fishing for compliments, because I can’t believe you’re saying such nice things about me,” Prompto says, eventually, chuckling as he goes.

There are sharp edges in the words, but not -- not enough to cut, Noctis thinks. 

Maybe. He hopes so.

So he tells the truth.

“I know how that feels.”

He’s looking down at his knees, and he’s not looking in Prompto’s direction.

But he can hear and feel the shift of Prompto’s weight in the couch that they’re sharing: he’s leaning in, and Noctis smiles, when their arms brush. “What do you know about me?”

Sharp intake of breath, next to him. “Dance is like -- your family business.”

“Pretty much,” Noctis says. “So think about it. My dad was a really, really good dancer. I literally followed in his footsteps. What do you think happened when I needed to be taught? When I needed to be learning how to do what he did?”

“I can think of a few things,” is the quiet answer. “They were either very kind to you or very hard on you. Your teachers. Your dad, even, if he taught you anything.”

“Not in the traditional way,” Noctis says. “I just watched what he did. He wasn’t exactly around to do the actual teaching, you know? He was always, always rehearsing. And if he was busy rehearsing then he couldn’t spend so much time with me, even when, even when I had made up my mind to do what he did. Even when I tried to do everything he did, but different. And my teachers would want to correct what I was doing because I was fucking it all up, but -- how do you do that _nicely_?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Prompto says.

And again Noctis experiences the hard fall of silence, the painful drop that echoes hollow and vast in his mind, that derails his train of thought. 

“Why not?” he makes himself ask.

“I had a teacher who said kindness was for everyone else,” is the quiet response, that comes after a long, long breath. “I had a teacher who said the world was cruel to those who were kind. He said, better to be the former than the latter. I -- didn’t exactly listen to him. I couldn’t make myself listen -- I kept thinking, I didn’t want to be the kind of person who kicked puppies.”

He blinks, and looks over at Prompto. “You had a puppy?”

“For like a week.” Solemn words. “I still don’t know where she came from. I don’t know where she went. She just appeared on the doorstep of the place where I was living, and -- she’d wag her tail while I practiced on the front steps. She’d lick my hands when I gave her something to eat. She didn’t have a collar or anything, so she must have been some kind of stray.

“My teacher -- he didn’t say anything, when he saw me sitting on the steps with that puppy. My puppy, I thought, my friend for a while. And I thought my teacher didn’t mind that I had a puppy, that I was distracted by the puppy. I thought it was okay for me to have a -- a friend like that.

“She stopped coming after a few days, and -- I was sad. Sad because she went away. And it showed in my dancing, did you really expect a kid to not be affected by that? That puppy was my friend, and she went away, and so I was sad. I wasn’t bouncing right, or my positions were all wrong, I don’t know, I don’t want to remember it. Maybe some teachers would be kind, maybe some would be understanding.” 

Prompto looks up then and the smile on his face almost makes Noctis twist away in disbelief: it’s a smile that isn’t a smile. It’s a grimace. It’s a broken parody. Rigid angle of the corners of his mouth and the fixed gnash of his teeth.

That smile doesn’t last long, however; Noctis lets out a small relieved breath, when Prompto swipes his hand over his eyes, when his mouth relaxes into a sad moue.

“My teacher made me tell him what the problem was, and after I told him: he laughed in my face,” Prompto says, after a moment. “Laughed and told me I would have felt much better if I had kicked the puppy because then I would know exactly what made her go away. Because then I would have controlled the reason why she had to go away. Imagine that. Can you?”

“No,” Noctis whispers. “I -- I couldn’t. I could never. Imagine that. Or kick a puppy. What did the puppy ever do? And what did your teacher have against her?”

“I have no idea. I’ve tried to figure out what the whole fucking thing was about and it’s been years, and I still have no idea,” Prompto says. 

“That was the first time I thought that maybe there was something -- not right -- about my teacher. But what did I know about doing something about it? What did I know about right and wrong? All I wanted to do was dance. All I wanted to do was learn how to do it right. And -- I did, I might have, but what did I get in exchange for learning it?”

Noctis opens his mouth, and the words don’t come out, because he has none to give -- 

Footsteps, moving in their direction. 

The tilt of Ignis’s head, the line of his shoulders, the uptick of the corner of his mouth: he looks kind, and he also looks a little concerned. “Is now a good time?”

“I have no idea.” But Prompto looks up.

And Noctis watches him blink at the ladle in Ignis’s left hand.

No, not at the ladle: the ring he’s wearing.

A ring exactly like Gladio’s, plain and black and polished. 

“I’ve never seen you wear that before,” Prompto says, and Noctis envies him the clean quick line of his hand, flicking in Ignis’s direction. “You -- you don’t wear that, at the studio.”

“Incorrect. I don’t wear my ring when I am practicing.” Small amused smile. “I don’t wear my glasses, either, if you’ll recall. It’s just me, if I have to dance.”

“Why?”

“Old habit,” is the easy answer. “One I may need to break. I confess I have no idea how to do that -- break a habit, that is.”

“Liar,” Noctis laughs, and he tips a wink at Prompto’s scandalized look. 

Ignis, of course, snorts quietly in response. “Of course I am lying, but only when it comes to you.”

“Oh fuck no,” and Noctis laughs some more.

“Everything else, however, is the truth, including this: dinner is ready.”

But it’s easy to get up and follow in his wake, through the glass doors, and he blinks when there’s silence in his wake and he turns, looks at Prompto still seemingly fastened to the couch. 

“Something wrong?” Ignis asks. He’s always been quicker on the draw.

“I -- everything else is the truth, you said.” Prompto looks like he’s torn down the middle between stricken and sweetly, painfully believing. “Including -- the other things?”

“You will need to be more specific,” Ignis says, gently. “Perhaps we haven’t had that many conversations, but -- we seem to have talked about quite a lot of subjects.”

“I -- yeah. I -- you think I’m okay, I mean, in terms of, of dancing?”

Tic, tic, in the outer corner of Ignis’s eye.

He’s about to duck into the kitchen when Gladio steps through the door and offers him a mug of -- savory steam, the waft of cream and mushrooms and pepper and lemon, and Noctis mutters a quick “Thanks”. Takes a cautious sip, so he doesn’t burn his tongue.

And he doesn’t take his eyes off Ignis as he crosses the room and takes Prompto by the shoulders, and lifts him on to his feet. 

Gladio chuckles next to him. 

“Fortunately for you, I’m not the type of person who says things such as, _I am only going to say this once, so listen very closely_ ,” Ignis says. “Some things bear repeating, and frequently, such as: I tell Gladio that I love him, every chance I get.”

“Love you too,” Noctis hears, from next to him. 

He straightens his shoulders when the next thing out of Ignis’s mouth is: “Noctis?”

“Yeah.”

“I believe in you.”

He looks down at the floor, and knows he doesn’t have a hope of hiding how grateful he is, how he bites his lip and closes his eyes so he doesn’t sniffle, or shuffle his feet.

“...You tell him that? That you believe in him?” Prompto, sounding startled.

“He needs to hear it. I need to hear it. And it is more than clear to me that you need to hear it,” is the calm reply. “It’s better, isn’t it? To have someone tell you something sincere like that. And I have been sincere, when I said that you had a gift.”

“Said the same thing, too,” Noctis says, softly. “I believed it. I really believed it.”

“And that was good, wasn’t it?” Ignis asks.

“Yeah.” It’s a very small word, but it comes from Prompto, and that’s the important thing.

“If you need any of us to say it, please will you let us know?”

“I -- ”

“Prompto.”

Even Noctis looks up again, when Ignis speaks in that gentle stern voice. 

“Maybe it’s hard to believe now, but: it’s normal to need that sort of thing.”

“Didn’t get it,” is the quiet response. “Like, I didn’t understand it then. And I never heard him say I was doing well. Not once. Not ever.”

Gladio growls, softly, next to Noctis.

He feels like growling, himself.

And Ignis? 

He says, “Come along.”

Hands still on Prompto’s shoulders, coaxing, and Noctis watches him, watches them, come closer and closer -- the room isn’t so large, not with all of them in the same spaces, and he doesn’t yelp when Prompto is all but carefully pushed into his arms -- he can’t yelp, he’s too busy slinging an arm around Prompto’s shoulders, he’s not even thinking about it --

And Gladio against his side, Ignis against Prompto’s back.

“...Group hug?” Prompto asks. “Really?”

“’S what we do here at home,” Gladio says, and Noctis feels the words rumble through him, and into Prompto.

“Hush,” Ignis says. 

“Dinner,” Noctis hears Prompto sigh. 

“In a moment,” Ignis says. 

Like safety, like shelter, Noctis thinks, as he supports Prompto on his right side.


	2. Chapter 2

He’s prickling all over, he’s starting to feel cold on the back of his neck, and Noctis gives up on the plate before him: and there’s a bit of crust left on the plate, a golden-yellow dollop of wobbly custard, a slice of perfectly ripe strawberry.

Scrape of a fork, flash of a freckled wrist, and that slice disappears into Prompto’s mouth, leaving nothing more than a drop of juice on the blue-painted plate.

“You want to take the leftovers home?” Gladio asks, and he’s up on his feet, he’s picking up the dessert forks and depositing them in the sink.

Noctis blinks. “You talking to me or to him,” and he points to Prompto.

“Either one of you. Both of you,” is the answer, laced with a too-low, too-graveled chuckle. 

“Give them all to him then,” he says. “I’ll survive somehow, it’s not like Ignis won’t try to feed me something else.”

Wide blue eyes. “You sure about that, Noctis?” 

He nods, firmly, at Prompto. “I am, I’m really sure.”

And he needs to escape, and he does, and doesn’t notice the frown on Gladio’s face.

Doesn’t hear Prompto ask, “What was it I said?”

Up and through to the balcony on the third floor, where Ignis is sitting quietly at the tiny wrought-iron table with the chessboard pattern painted onto the top, and he collapses next to that table, little caring about the cold stone beneath him. “Sorry,” he says, softly.

“What are you apologizing about?”

“I -- for a while there I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t think of it,” he says, and he’s not choking back sobs, he’s not. He’s trying to separate himself from the story, from Prompto’s story.

If he can’t separate himself from the story, he’ll -- he’ll find himself choking on the blind rage that no longer has a viable or even living target.

That’s unfair to him, and especially unfair to Prompto: and it’s Prompto who has the right to fall to pieces, who had quietly done just that between the main course and the dessert.

He’s just a listener, he’s just a bystander, and there’s no way for him to travel through time in any case. The story is in the past tense, and Prompto is without a doubt present in the here and now, somehow strong enough to fall to pieces and talk about Ardyn Izunia and -- eat a slice of custard pie, afterwards, with only a wisp of a tremor remaining in the hand holding the dessert fork.

“It was a horror story, wasn’t it?” Ignis says, after a moment, folding and unfolding his hands in his lap. 

“Yeah,” and Noctis sits on his own hands so he doesn’t give in to the stray impulse to hit something. 

Prompto’s voice, mostly steady between bites of beef curry and new potatoes and kimchi, and no more than a bare handful of stories.

But he’d started feeling the curdling in his gut from the start, when Prompto had started off by talking about how he had been essentially abandoned to Ardyn’s tender mercies -- and the impression had only gotten worse and worse as he talked about dancing with pointe shoes that were at least two sizes too small. As he talked about bruised joints and training on an empty stomach. As he talked about a never-ending stream of jokes made at his expense. 

“Not even when you nailed the thing he wanted you to do?” he remembers Gladio asking, scowl somehow carefully concealed. “Like, you’d do a move correctly and -- he’d still tell you you were doing it wrong?”

“Yeah,” he remembers Prompto responding. “He said he had sharp eyes, you know? So he always told me that he could see how I was shaking or unsteady or something like that. And he’d hit me with his crutches and force me to start over. I learned to dodge, a little, like Noctis dodged when you tried to punch him? And at some point I understood he was lying to me in order to hit me. So I got better at dodging.”

“I wasn’t serious,” Gladio had said. “About hitting Noctis, I mean. Why would I even want to do that.”

“Oh. I really thought you were.”

That was the point at which Ignis had softly cleared his throat and offered around the custard pie.

And now he and Ignis were here.

“I have an admission to make,” Ignis says, after a moment.

“Yeah,” Noctis says, again.

“We were all listening to Prompto earlier, and I could tell that you and Gladio were trying to keep your tempers under control. And you did an admirable job, mind you. So I feel a little unsettled.” His sigh is almost lost in the nighttime hum of the city streets. “I knew the story in advance, you see.”

Noctis blinks, and lays his forehead on his knees. “Luna?”

“Yes. I pressed her to tell me.”

“You never did explain that to me: how was she there? I was going to ask her about how Ravus was, and then all this happened,” Noctis hears himself say. “And also, how did she know about Ardyn?”

The thought occurs to him, sudden and ugly and terrifying: “She was never a student of that bastard, was she? I know all of Ravus’s teachers but, but not hers -- ”

“No, never, I didn’t even have to ask. That was the first thing she told me after she said he had died,” Ignis says.

He wants to breathe a sigh of relief, and doesn’t. He can’t. “So she told you that -- she knew him somehow.” 

“Because entirely without her intending to, she had gathered a group of people who had some kind of connection to him.”

“And they led her to Prompto.”

“Something like that.” This time Ignis sighs on a quiet curse. “They all got away from Ardyn earlier, before you ask,” he says. “Years ago. Seems the man lived an oddly long life, for all his injuries, for all his pain. Enough that Luna’s list had almost a dozen names on it.”

He thinks about the profiles he had skimmed, while Prompto was sleeping. “Anyone we know?” 

“Not to you, not as such,” is the reply. “But I am familiar with their careers. Perhaps the most prominent one was Luche, Luche Lazarus.”

The name rings a bell. “Didn’t he -- record an album and it hit the charts, and then -- ” 

Chill in his veins. “And then he killed himself.”

“Yes,” and he’s sure he’s not imagining the quiet horror in Ignis’s voice. “He left a fairly straightforward farewell letter behind, and it placed all the blame on Ardyn’s shoulders.”

“Prompto,” Noctis says, suddenly, and he gets to his feet.

“Bring him here,” Ignis says.

He takes the steps back down to the second floor by twos and threes, something that almost tastes like panic spurring him on, and then -- there’s movement on the landing and a shape, falling back, suddenly and gracefully --

“Noctis.” 

Subdued, again, as on that first night. As in the alleyway.

He speaks before he can think: “I am so sick and tired of you being so quiet. So sick of it that I want to kill the person who did this to you. It’s his fault. He did this.”

“I want to kill him, too, and -- and I’m relieved, because he killed himself -- that’s pretty much what happened. He destroyed himself.”

Prompto wrings his hands together on the landing and Noctis grits his teeth, and forces out the words: “Can I hug you?”

A cough of a small laugh. “Yes? I think -- fuck that, fuck _I think_ , I really need a hug? But -- ”

Noctis steps forward and carefully pulls him in, and this time there’s nothing between them, nothing like sand or bits and pieces of a car.

No music, either: just the harsh rasp of their breaths in the stairwell.

He’s gentle, when he holds Prompto -- but a sound like a sob rips its way out of Prompto and the arms around Noctis’s waist tighten, convulsively, and he can feel the shape of Prompto’s fists bunching in the small of his back.

“Just, just,” Prompto is saying.

“I’m here,” Noctis says, pulling him in, closer and closer still, till he can feel the push of Prompto’s chest against his, the push of every deep despairing breath.

“Yeah.” And: “Fuck, I think it’s only now sinking in.”

“Tell me if you can. And if you can’t,” Noctis swallows again, past that sharp-edged lump in his throat, “I’m still here.”

“Why?” Soft burst of a sob. “Sorry. Don’t mean to say that. I mean, I should stop asking you guys why you’re even sticking around. You just are. You just are, and I -- I didn’t know what to say when Gladio said I could talk to him, too, and I literally just met him tonight.”

“Did he tell you what he writes?”

A snort escapes Prompto, this time. “You wanted that to be a surprise, didn’t you? Big tall guy, looks like he could probably bench-press all three of us -- ”

“Forget probably: he can,” Noctis says, “I’ve seen him do it with weights, he can bench-press all three of us, easy.”

“Built like a brick wall and he writes romance novels. I’ve read some of his books, you know, I even gave my friend a box set for her birthday last year. What the actual fuck.”

“Have her come by some time,” Noctis says, “pretty sure Gladio won’t mind signing her books.”

“I’ll tell her, she’ll kick my ass,” Prompto laughs -- watery wan sound, but it’s a laugh anyway.

Silence falls again.

“Noctis?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“I’ve been running scared of Ardyn all my life, and I don’t know how to stop being scared.”

And Prompto pulls away, and sits down on the landing.

Noctis sits below him, two steps down. “I don’t know how to stop being scared of falling,” he says. “Like, land wrong and fall flat on my face. I’ve done that. I still do that. I am never going to stop being afraid of that. And -- I jump anyway. I leap anyway. I’m shaking and I’m nervous. I do it anyway.”

Hand on his shoulder, and he doesn’t look over. Doesn’t shrug it off either.

“It’s not the same,” and he goes on. “It can never be the same. But -- you’re dancing even when you’re afraid. You’re still dancing. I think that has to count. I think that’s -- not the secret, it’s not a secret, it’s just the thing you do.”

“And the thing you do,” Prompto says.

He gives in to the temptation to place his hand over Prompto’s. “Yeah. All we can do, anyway.”

**Author's Note:**

> ninemoons42 on Tumblr: [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)


End file.
